The season is over. Fourteenth. Forty-three points. Graham Potter telling assembled journalists with a straight face that there are “real foundations being laid” for next year, which is a sentence I have now heard, in various forms, from approximately six different West Ham managers across my adult lifetime. The sun is out over east London, the Olympic Park looks almost aggressively cheerful in the May light, and somewhere deep in my chest there is the familiar dull ache of another campaign that promised something and delivered the square root of nothing in particular.
I’ve been supporting West Ham since I was seven years old. My dad took me to Upton Park for the first time in 1994 and the die was cast in the way these things get cast in childhood – permanently, irrationally, with no meaningful understanding of what I was signing up for. Thirty-one years later I am a grown man with a functioning brain and sufficient life experience to know that the hope I feel every August is not based in evidence. I feel it anyway. This is what supporting West Ham does to you. It is not a hobby. It is a condition.
So. Let’s go through it.
Same Story, Different Manager, Same Finish
Julen Lopetegui was a strange appointment from the first day, and most West Ham supporters knew it. The man had just been sacked by Wolves – Wolves – having turned a functional if unglamorous squad into something genuinely difficult to watch. The rationale for bringing him to east London was never entirely clear. We had money to spend, a squad with some genuinely good players in it, and the first season without European football in three years. The conditions were there for a proper push at the top half.
Instead we got six wins from twenty league games and an atmosphere around the club that curdled somewhere around November. The sacking came in January, which felt both overdue and slightly pointless given what came next. Graham Potter arrived, well-liked, thoughtful, carrying the accumulated goodwill of his Brighton years. His first match was an FA Cup tie against Aston Villa which we lost having been ahead at half-time, which is so perfectly West Ham that I almost had to laugh. His points-per-game average over the rest of the season turned out to be marginally lower than Lopetegui’s. We finished fourteenth, which is exactly where we were heading in January regardless.
There is a particular variety of frustration that comes not from disaster but from persistent, grinding adequacy – from the sense that the same mediocre destination keeps being reached by different routes. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again. The managers change. The trajectory stays remarkably, almost impressively consistent.
Antonio, Paquetá, and the Season That Lost Its Shape
Football seasons have moments that reframe everything around them, and this one had two.
Michail Antonio’s car accident in December was the first. Whatever you thought of him as a footballer – and at thirty-four he was no longer the force he’d been at his peak – Mich was the heartbeat of this club in a way that statistics don’t fully capture. He was here when we won in Prague. He is West Ham’s all-time leading Premier League scorer, or near enough to it to make the point. When the news came through about the accident, the football became briefly, properly irrelevant in the way it only does when something real intrudes. He’s recovering, which is what matters. But his absence – the knowledge of why he was absent – cast a shadow over the second half of the season that never quite lifted.
Then there’s Lucas Paquetá, and the long, grinding shadow of the FA’s betting investigation. I’ll be careful here because nothing has been concluded and the man deserves that care. But it has been there, in the background, all season – this cloud over one of our most talented players, never quite resolving, occasionally flaring back into the headlines and then receding again. It is exactly the kind of slow-burning uncertainty that makes it difficult to simply enjoy watching someone play football, which is supposed to be the point of all this.
The London Stadium, Nine Years Later
I still miss Upton Park. I am aware this marks me out as A Certain Type of West Ham Fan, and I accept the designation. But I think the people who insist the London Stadium is fine now, that we’ve adjusted, that the atmosphere has improved – I think they’re doing that thing where you talk yourself into something because the alternative is too dispiriting to sit with.
It’s been nine years since we moved. Nine years of players looking slightly baffled by the distance between themselves and a crowd that is physically, structurally unable to get close to the pitch the way they could at the Boleyn. Nine years of corner flags that feel like they’re in a different postcode from the fans. Nine years of an echo that turns noise into mush and a running track that belongs, atmospherically, on a different planet from a genuine football ground. The club have tried. The safe-standing section helps. But there are things you cannot engineer your way out of, and the fundamental geometry of that stadium is one of them.
Upton Park was loud in a way that got inside you. It wasn’t always pretty and it certainly wasn’t modern, but it was ours in a way the London Stadium will probably never quite be. When I go now, which I do because I can’t not go, I find myself aware of the space in a way I never was on Green Street. Football should make you feel enclosed and tribal and slightly unreasonable. The London Stadium makes you feel like you’re watching it inside an airport.
The One Thing We Got Right
Jarrod Bowen. Thirteen league goals, ten assists, and the captain’s armband worn with a quiet authority that felt genuinely earned rather than assigned. In a season when it would have been extremely easy to disengage – when the manager changed, when results were poor, when off-field noise was constant – Bowen simply kept playing, kept delivering, kept being the sort of player that makes you feel vaguely guilty for complaining about anything else.
He cost twenty million pounds in January 2020, which in the current market feels like a parking fine. He is now the second-highest Premier League scorer in the club’s history and still improving, still finding new dimensions to his game at twenty-eight. On the days when the stadium feels too big and the performance too tepid and the whole enterprise slightly absurd, Bowen doing something extraordinary is the thing that cuts through. He is the argument for sticking around, made flesh.
Aaron Wan-Bissaka also deserves a mention – his first season at the club was considerably better than the rest of it, and he gave supporters something to actually shout about in the full-back position, which has historically been where West Ham come to bury their transfer fees and their dignity.
Why I’ll Be Back in August
Here is the question I genuinely ask myself at the end of every season, with varying degrees of seriousness, and never reach a satisfying answer to: why do I keep doing this?
It’s not rational. The club is owned by people whose vision for it I don’t fully share, playing in a stadium I have mixed feelings about, managed at the moment by someone whose record over half a season inspires cautious optimism at best. Fourteenth place. Again. The foundations are being laid. Again.
And yet. August will come, and the fixtures will be released, and I will look at the first home game of the season and feel something shift in my chest – that same irrational thing my dad installed in me in 1994 in the old Chicken Run end at Upton Park. It isn’t hope exactly, though it contains hope. It’s more like recognition. This is mine. This is the thing I chose, or that chose me, or that found me at seven years old and decided it wasn’t finished.
West Ham break my heart with an almost professional consistency. I have made my peace with this. The heartbreak is part of it – woven into the fabric of what it means to support a club that is never quite bad enough to walk away from and never quite good enough to stop you wondering what might have been.
Fourteen years of Conservative government I could vote my way out of, at least in theory. West Ham is for life.
See you in August.
